Q-particles and islands in Sinhala wh- and polar questions

+Q/-Q and the Ambiguity Hypothesis of wh-Islands

This paper reexamines the Ross (1967) claim that while interrogative (+Q) CPs are islands for whextraction, as shown in 1a and 1b, declarative (-Q) CPs are not, as shown in 2a and 2b. Alexopoulou and Keller (2007) report that English-speaking subjects find extractions in the Island condition to have degraded acceptability as compared to the Non-island condition, in non-embedded and embedded con...

The syntax of wh- and polar questions in Marshallese

In this article, we are concerned with the syntactic structure of questions in Marshallese. We explore both whand polar questions in turn: Section 2 is dedicated to wh-questions, where, applying diagnostics suggested by Adger and Ramchand (2005, henceforth AR), we conclude that a base generation analysis is more empirically adequate for Marshallese than a movement account. In Section 3 we discu...

Q - Particles and the Nature of Wh - Fronting 105 4 Q - PARTICLES AND THE NATURE OF WH - FRONTING 1

Similarity of wh-Phrases and Acceptability Variation in wh-Islands

In wh-questions that form a syntactic dependency between the fronted wh-phrase and its thematic position, acceptability is severely degraded when the dependency crosses another wh-phrase. It is well known that the acceptability degradation in wh-island violation ameliorates in certain contexts, but the source of this variation remains poorly understood. In the syntax literature, an influential ...

WH-questions without WH-words

Such WH-less WH-Questions (let us call them WLWQs) are very often used as questions in written tests or uttered by quizmasters in quizzes, though not often in daily conversations. 2 I assume that, despite their restriction in the range of registers, WLWQs are also constrained by the knowledge of human language. To my knowledge, there has been no previous research on WLWQs in the field. This pap...